“Rodney King,” a one-man show arriving Friday on Netflix, aims to humanize its famous subject, inviting viewers to “Go beyond the myth and the mayhem.”

Steven Adams

A pair of Bay Area natives played instrumental roles on the project: Its star, Berkeley-born actor Roger Guenveur Smith, has been performing “Rodney King” live in theaters across the country since 2012. And one of the producers is Oakland’s Steven Adams.

Directed by Spike Lee, the film is timed to the 25th anniversary of when a Simi Valley jury acquitted four white Los Angeles Police Department officers who were videotaped beating King, a black man, in 1991. The jury’s decision sparked charges of racism and touched off six days of violent rioting in Los Angeles.

Smith, who describes King as “the first reality TV star,” recently presented the final performances of the stage play in Portland, where he told the Oregonian that the production is all about revealing the man behind the myth.

“Rodney King is known primarily as a human piñata, the symbol of police brutality,” he said. “But actually, he was a full-blown human being who, just like all of us, had good parts, and not-so-good parts. He was certainly not prepared for international notoriety. There were attempts to make him kind of a spokesperson. He was not going to be a spokesperson. He resisted that role wholeheartedly.”

King died in 2012 from drowning after struggling with alcoholism and drug abuse. During the height of the riots, he issued a public statement in an attempt to quell the violence, plaintively asking, “Can we all get along?” Smith developed the show shortly after learning of his death. He has referred to it as a “post-mortem.”

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Adams, a San Francisco State University and Skyline High School alum, has been collaborating with Smith since the early 1990s. Their first major work together was “A Huey P. Newton Story,” about the co-founder of the Black Panther Party. That one-man show was adapted into a Peabody Award-winning film, also directed by Lee.

Adams considers Smith the perfect person to bring King’s story to life.

“Roger has this great combination working for him,” he says. “He’s highly intelligent, plus he has an incredible gift for bringing history to life. He’s able to take big events and open them up in a way that allows you to enter them and feel them.”

The film, Adams says, asks the audience to look intimately “at the person. Rodney King was a brother, a son, a father,” he adds. “He was an ordinary man thrust into an extraordinary situation by technology and happenstance.”

The Netflix film was shot by Lee on Aug. 12 at the East River Park Amphitheater in New York City.

Contact Chuck Barney at cbarney@bayareanewsgroup.com. Follow him at Twitter.com/chuckbarney and Facebook.com/bayareanewsgroup.chuckbarney.